A hundred fifty years ago, at least some Americans recognized that all serious discourse depended on the use of the faculty called Reason.

Formal debate, science, and law all flowed from that source.

A common bond existed in some schools of the day. The student was expected to learn how Reason operates, and for that he was taught the only subject which could lay out, as on a long table, the visible principles: Logic.

This was accepted.

But now, this bond is gone.

The independence engendered by the disciplined study of logic is no longer a desired quality in students.

The classroom, at best, has taken on the appearance of a fact-memorization factory; and we should express grave doubts about the relevance and truth of many of those facts.

A society filled with people who float in the drift of non-logic is a society that declines.

Ideologies that deny individual freedom and independence are welcomed with open arms.

When education becomes so degraded that young students are no longer taught to reason clearly, private citizens have the obligation rebuild that system so the great contribution to Western civilization—logic—is reinstated in its rightful place.

Logic, the key by which true political discourse, science, and law were, in fact, originally developed, must be unearthed.

Logic and reasoning, the capacity to think, the ability to analyze ideas—an ability which has been forgotten, which has been a surpassing virtue in every free civilization—must be restored.

Once a vital thing has been misplaced, buried, and covered over by mindless substitutions, people cannot immediately recognize the original thing has any importance, meaning, or existence.

To declare its importance makes no sense to “the crowd.” They look bewildered and shake their heads. They search their memories and find nothing.

They prefer to adhere to rumor, gossip, accusation, wild speculation, and fear mongering as the primary means of public discourse and assessment of truth.

These habits light their paths. These reflexes give them some degree of pleasure. These idols become their little gods.

To win out over such attachments and superstitions is a job for the long term.

But if our labors yield rewards, we can once again bring import to education, and to the idea of authentic freedom that once cut a wide swathe through darkness.

A string of direct and distracting abuses has saddled our schools. Among them:

* Teachers believe they need to entertain children, in order to capture their attention;

* School systems have substituted the need for public funds in the place of actually supplying a sound education;

* Under the banner of political correctness, school texts have been sanitized to the point of sterility, in order to avoid the possibility of offending, to the slightest degree, any group;

* Students rarely confront information in the form in which it is delivered to people all over the world—they confront substitutes;

* Students have, in this respect, been coddled;

* Subjects such as sex education, which belong in the family, have been delivered into the hands of schools and teachers;

* Indeed, in certain key respects, schools are asked to substitute and stand in for parents;

* Masked as “learning opportunities,” various political agendas have been inserted in school curricula;

* The basis on which every historic document establishing some degree of freedom was debated and drafted—logical thought—has been eliminated from the curriculum as a serious discipline;

* Students are permitted and even encouraged to drift and grasp at superficially attractive ideas and fads of the moment;

* In this respect, freedom has been reinterpreted to mean “mental incapacity and wandering thought”;

* The vast contributions of the ancient Greek civilization, where logic as a crucial subject was born, have been obliterated, minimized or summarized in sterile fashion;

* Logic, the connective tissue which binds together the progression of ideas in rational argument, has been kept away from students;

* The result is the production of shallow minds that cannot see the architecture of reasoning;

* Students, at sea, begin to invent wholly insufficient standards for accepting or rejecting various points of view and supposed authorities;

* Students lose their true independence without ever having gained it;

* The low level of overall literacy in our schools is matched only by the non-comprehension of rational thought;

In the presence of these and other deficiencies and abuses, students are pushed through, from grade to grade, graduation to graduation, as a bureaucratic function, regardless of their ability.

Therefore, citizens of good intent must offload this system. They must assume responsibility for teaching children the missing key to education.

Logic; the capacity to reason, to think lucidly; to separate sense from chatter; to discover deception and avoid being influenced by it; to remain free and independent from the shifting opinions of “the herd”; to maintain personal liberty in the face of every spurious enticement to abandon it; to come to grips with competitive sets of First Principles which will lead to freedom or slavery; these are the stakes in our time.

This is the crossroad.

Choose the path that can bring us the fulfillment of a worthy goal.

Choose reason over vacuous mindlessness.

We, who still know the power of the mind, and who understand how that power can be harnessed to shape independence and liberty, can bring, out of the dust of recent history, an education that truly trains the intellect.

Logic is the foundation of such an education.

If schools, which have become madhouses and factories and toxic medical dispensaries, will not teach it, we can teach it.

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

Like this:

“Under the surface of this global civilization, a great and secret war is taking place. The two opponents hold different conceptions of Reality. On one side, those who claim that humans operate purely on the basis of stimulus-response, like machines; on the other side, those who believe there is a gigantic thing called freedom. Phase One of the war is already over. The stimulus-response people have won. In Phase Two, people are waking up to the far-reaching and devastating consequences of the Pavlovian program.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

“From the moment the first leader of the first clan in human history took charge, he busied himself with this question: ‘What can I say and do that will make my people react the way I want them to.’ He was the first Pavlov. He was the first psychologist, the first propagandist, the first mind-control boss. His was the first little empire. Since then, only the means and methods have changed.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

A thought-form is a picture-plus concept in the mind that tends to guide behavior.

Imagine a few thousand such corporations with interlocking boards and directorates; colluding with super-regional governments and their honeycombed bureaucracies; combined with regional armies, intelligence agencies and technological elites; hooked to a global surveillance operation; in control of media; cooperating with the largest organized religions on Earth.

Imagine all this as essentially one organization—and you see the thought-form in its wide-screen version.

Top-down as top-down has never been before.

Functions and compartments defined and specialized at every level, and coordinated in order to carry out policy decisions.

As to why such a thought-form should come to dominate human affairs, the simplest explanation is: because it works.

But beneath that answer, for those who can see, there is much, much more.

Individuals come to think that “effective” and “instrumental” and “efficient” are more important than any other issues.

The Machine has come to the fore. All questions are now about how the individual sees himself fitting into the structure and function of The Machine.

Are human beings becoming social constructs?

Populations are undergoing a quiet revolution. We can cite some of the reasons: television; education; job training and employment requirements; the Surveillance State; government organizations who follow a “zero tolerance” policy; inundation with advertising.

Yes, it’s all geared to produce people who are artificial constructs.

And this is just the beginning. There are a number of companies (see, for example, affectiva.com) who are dedicated to measuring “audience response” to ads and other public messages. I’m talking about electronic measuring. The use of bracelets, for instance, that record students’ emotional responses to teachers in classrooms, in real time. (Bill Gates shoveled grant money into several of these studies.)

Then there is facial recognition geared to the task of revealing how people are reacting when they sit at their computers.

Push-pull, ring the bell, watch the dog drool for his food. Stimulus-response.

It’s not much of a stretch to envision, up the road a few years, whole populations more than willing to volunteer for this kind of mass experimentation. But further than that, we could see society itself embrace, culturally, the ongoing measurement of stimuli and responses.

“Yes, I want to live like this. I want to be inside the system. I want to be analyzed. I want to be evaluated. I want to accept the results. I want to be part of the new culture. Put bracelets on me. Measure my eye movements, my throat twitches that indicate what I’m thinking, and my brain waves. Going to a movie should include the experience of wearing electrodes that record my second-to-second reactions to what’s happening on the screen. I like that. I look forward to it…”

In such a culture, “Surveillance State” would take on a whole new dimension.

“Sir, I want to report a malfunction in my television set. I notice the monitoring equipment that tracks my responses to programs has gone on the blink. I want it reattached as soon as possible. Can you fix it remotely, or do you need to send a repair person out to the house? I’ll be here all day…”

People will take pride in their ongoing role as social constructs, just as they now take pride in owning a quality brand of car.

The thought process behind this, in so far as any thought at all takes place, goes something like: “If I’m really a bundle of responses to stimuli and nothing more, then I want to be inside a system that champions that fact and records it…I don’t want to be left out in the cold.”

Here is a sample school situation of the near future: for six months, Mr. Jones, the teacher, has been video recorded, moment by moment, as he instructs his class in English. All the students have been wearing electronic bracelets [apple watches], and their real time emotional responses (interest, boredom, aversion) have also been recorded. A team of specialists has analyzed the six months of video, matching it up, second by second, to the students’ responses. The teacher is called in for a conference.

“Mr. Jones, we now know what you’re doing that works and what you’re doing that doesn’t work. We know exactly what students are positively reacting to, and what bores them. Therefore, we’re going to put you into a re-ed seminar, where you’ll learn precisely how to teach your classes from now on, to maximize your effectiveness. We’ll show you how to move your hands, what tone of voice to use, how to stand, when to make eye contact, and so on…”

Mr. Jones is now a quacking duck. He will be trained how to quack “for the greater good.” He is now a machine toy. Whatever is left of his passion, his intelligence, his free will, his spontaneous insights, his drive to make students actually understand what they’re learning…all subordinated for the sake of supposed efficiency.

Think this is an extreme fantasy? See the Chicago Tribune, June 12, 2012, “Biosensors to monitor students’ attentiveness”:

“The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has poured more than $4 billion into efforts to transform public education in the U.S., is pushing to develop an ‘engagement pedometer.’ Biometric devices wrapped around the wrists of students would identify which classroom moments excite and interest them — and which fall flat.”

“The foundation has given $1.4 million in grants to several university researchers to begin testing the devices in middle-school classrooms this fall [2012].”

“The biometric bracelets, produced by a Massachusetts startup company, Affectiva Inc, send a small current across the skin and then measure subtle changes in electrical charges as the sympathetic nervous system responds to stimuli. The wireless devices have been used in pilot tests to gauge consumers’ emotional response to advertising.”

“Gates officials hope the devices, known as Q Sensors, can become a common classroom tool, enabling teachers to see, in real time, which kids are tuned in and which are zoned out.”

“Existing measures of student engagement, such as videotaping classes for expert review or simply asking kids what they liked in a lesson, ‘only get us so far,’ said Debbie Robinson, a spokeswoman for the Gates Foundation. To truly improve teaching and learning, she said, ‘we need universal, valid, reliable and practical instruments’ such as the biosensors.”

“The Gates Foundation has spent two years videotaping 20,000 classroom lessons and breaking them down, minute by minute, to analyze how each teacher presents material and how those techniques affect student test scores.”

“Clemson received about $500,000 in Gates funding. Another $620,000 will support an MIT scientist, John Gabrieli, who aims to develop a scale to measure degrees of student engagement by comparing biosensor data to functional MRI brain scans [!] (using college students as subjects).”

When you boil it down, the world-view represented here has nothing to do with “caring about students.” It has everything to do with the Pavlovian view of humans as biological machines.

What input yields what response? How can people be shaped into predictable constructs?

As far as Gates is concerned, the underlying theme, as always, is: control.

In this new world, the process of thinking and comparing and independently judging, and the freedom to make individual choices…well, for whatever that was worth, we can’t encourage it for a whole society. It’s too unpredictable. We don’t have time for that sort of thing. No, we have to achieve reduction. We have to seek out lowest common denominators.

This is what universal surveillance is all about; the observation of those denominators and the variances from them—the outlying and therefore dangerous departures from the norm.

“Well, we’ve tracked Mr. Jones’ classroom for a year now, and we’ve collated all the measurements of reactions from the students. It was a wonderful study. But we did notice one thing. All the students showed similar patterns of reactions over time…except two students. We couldn’t fit them into the algorithms. They seemed to be responding oppositely. It was almost as if they were intentionally defecting from the group. This signals some kind of disorder. We need a name for it. Is it Oppositional Defiance Disorder, or is it new? We recommend attaching electrodes to those two students’ skulls, so we can get a better readout of their brain activity in real time.”

You see, everything must be analyzed on the basis of stimulus response. Those two students are suffering from a brain problem. They must be. Because if they aren’t, if they have the ability to choose and decide how to respond, then they have free will, and that can’t be measured. Much deeper, that also suggests an X-factor in humans, wherein the flow of chemicals and atoms and quarks and mesons and photons don’t tell the whole story. The rest of the story would imply the existence of something that is…non-material…above and beyond push-pull cause and effect.

The gatekeepers of this world are obsessed with ruling that out. They guard Reality itself, which is to say, their conception of Reality. They are willing to spend untold amounts of money to make that Pavlovian conception universally accepted and universally loved.

Because they own that conception. They are the self-appointed title holders. They are the kings of that domain.

I feel obligated to inform them that their domain is much, much smaller than they think it is. And in the fullness of time, which is very long, the domain is going to fall and crack and collapse and disintegrate. And all their horses and all their men won’t be able to put it back together.

Eventually, a man like Bill Gates will be forgotten. He’ll be a small footnote on a dusty page in a crumbling book in a dark room on a remote island.

A morbid venal fool who chased, for a brief moment, fool’s gold.

There is an irreducible thing. It’s called freedom. It is native to every individual.

Sometimes it rears its head in the middle of the night, and the dreamer awakes.

And he asks himself: what is my freedom for?

And then he begins a voyage that no device can record, measure, or analyze.

If he pursues it long enough, it takes him out of the labyrinth.

Pavlov wrote: “Mankind will possess incalculable advantages and extraordinary control over human behavior when the scientific investigator will be able to subject his fellow men to the same external analysis he would employ for any natural object…”

Basically, Pavlov was promoting the idea that whatever an individual perceives and feels about his own experience is a confused mess and an obstruction.

Rather, the individual should ignore all that tripe, and instead, allow himself to be a “natural object,” see himself as a clean and simple response mechanism, as planned inputs cause him to behave in various ways.

In other words, then he will have no life.

Bill Gates and other elite planners are working toward this end.

When Ray Kurzweil talks about hooking brains up to super-computers, he is envisioning a process of downloading that goes beyond choice. Somehow, automatically, the brain and the individual (he apparently believes they are the same thing) will receive inputs that translate into knowledge and even talent. This is another fatuous version of Pavlov.

In Brave New World, Huxley wrote: “Hot tunnels alternated with cool tunnels. Coolness was wedded to discomfort in the form of hard X-rays. By the time they were decanted the embryos had a horror of cold. They were predestined to emigrate to the tropics, to be miner[s] and acetate silk spinners and steel workers. Later on their minds would be made to endorse the judgment of their bodies. ‘We condition them to thrive on heat’, concluded Mr. Foster. ‘Our colleagues upstairs will teach them to love it’.”

Stimulus-response.

If researchers developed this technology, who could doubt that elite planners would push it forward? It would be the culmination of their dream.

The freedom of the individual, his innate capacity to make wide-ranging choices, is the monkey wrench in the program. It is anti-stimulus-response.

This is why you would have to search far and wide to find, in one school, anywhere, on any level, a course that examines and promotes individual freedom.

It is anathema to the plan.

It is the silver bullet for the vampire.

Freedom comes from Within the individual, not from Without.

On the level of political control, freedom emerged and broke through during centuries of struggle.

Now, and in the future, every individual carries that torch.

So it is incumbent on the individual to understand the scope and meaning and power of his own freedom, and to decide for himself what his freedom is FOR.

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

We’re familiar with the body’s immune system. It mounts a reaction to intruders, and in the process it swings into a full inflammatory response. Swelling occurs. Fever. The result, if the immune system is healthy, is the banishing of the intruders and a return to well-being. The body gains a victory—and the person builds confidence in his ability to stave off attacks.

The mind has the potential to operate in a similar fashion. But there are prerequisites. The mind needs basic ideas and principles on which to erect its response.

These basics are inherent in a healthy mind: the desire for freedom, for self-sufficiency, for the creation of a desired future, for committed work in that direction.

In the absence of these strong fundamentals, the mind will not mount a direct immune response against intruders. It will be clueless.

What are the intruders? Well, they are precisely the external influences that lessen, minimize, squelch, and sideline the inherent basics.

Whatever would challenge freedom, self-sufficiency, committed work on behalf of creating a desired future—THESE are the factors the mind’s immune system responds against.

But if the mind has been tuned to DEPENDENCE, all bets are off. The immune system is confused. It doesn’t respond swiftly and decisively. It is looking for, and favoring, more dependence, and so it is essentially working backwards. It has already let the opponent in the door.

When intruding ideas enter—ideas that try to reject freedom and self-sufficiency—the mind’s immune system allows them deep inside. There is no defense. There is no full inflammatory response.

When the mind is fortified with the basics, it sees these destructive ideas for what they are, and it nullifies them. There may be a period of crisis, during which the mind is sorting out thorny deceptions and coming to terms with them. But finally, it sees with clarity, and it wins.

What now passes for education plays a role here. If schools downplay the strength of the mind, if they offer a flabby flaccid curriculum over a period of years, the mind tends toward surrender. And the stepchild of surrender is dependence. Game over.

In the culture, these things used to be understood fairly well. That day is gone.

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

“…intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist. From that tradition many of our intellectuals are visibly turning away. They have accepted the principle that a book should be published or suppressed, praised or damned, not on its merits but according to political expediency. And others who do not actually hold this view assent to it from sheer cowardice.” (George Orwell, 1953)

When those who control public discourse, in a nation, see that they are losing to upstarts, that their flimsy ideas are being supplanted by much stronger ideas from these newcomers (who are actually traditionalists), the shocked controllers turn to the more direct strategy of censorship.

In terms of substance, and even popularity, the ministers of truth are losing; so they abandon reasoned discourse altogether. They desert this fertile, competitive, and NECESSARY territory. They no longer debate. They ban.

Among their supporters are crowds of illiterates.

There are many people who, because their education was a vaporous thing, have no interest in the written or spoken word.

Their natural impulse is to make excuses. “Who needs books?” “People who write books are showing their privilege.”

For these excuse-makers, book burning would mean NOTHING. All that matters is: what slogans should I shout?

For the illiterate, a book is a mystery. How could anyone put all the words together and write one? Somehow, the author must have a secret method of downloading the book from an elite source, a cloud, a machine, a trick in their DNA.

A book, a report, an article, a study, an essay—millions of people in “advanced societies” don’t have a clue. When censorship tightens, who cares? It’s just words.

IT’S JUST WORDS.

Long ago, when I taught school, I had an experience I wish many people could share. Twenty children in a 10th-grade classroom. No student was reading up to that grade level. Each student was reading at a DIFFERENT (sub-standard) level. Time to teach reading. How could it be done? It couldn’t.

Elite societal players welcome illiteracy. They love it. It’s one of their cherished goals. Ignorance is good. More than that, illiterate people are easy to convince that repressive censorship isn’t a problem. It’s just something that “happens.”

If you don’t have “the right ideas,” you should be censored.

IT’S JUST WORDS.

Words are useless “things” like tacks and marbles and crayons and paper clips. Who cares?

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.” (George Orwell, “1984”)

At its root, illiteracy becomes a form of reductionism. What can be comprehended, discussed, debated, or reasoned shrinks.

IT’S JUST WORDS.

Illiteracy is more effective than political correctness. Untold numbers of people can’t understand the sentences that are floating and flying by them every day. They register this by building up anger. Unfocused anger. They are perfect fodder for know-nothing social and political movements that requite violence and repression. After all, they were repressed, weren’t they? Weren’t they left hanging out in the wind by their education, their schooling? Now is the time for revenge.

Along the way, censorship becomes a very good thing. They were limited in what they learned; therefore, limit everyone else. Why not?

IT’S JUST WORDS.

There is a sub-text percolating in many, many schools: “All right, you students, this is your education. We’re going to keep you from learning the language. We’re going to hold it back from you. At the same time, we’re going to praise you and push you ahead from grade to grade. You’ll know something is wrong. But you’ll accept what we do to you. It’s easier. You’ll take a ride through school, and then we’ll dump you out into the world. We’re making rebels wholesale. Ignorant rebels. Rebels without the tools for THINKING. You’ll have to find a place where thinking isn’t important. Good luck. Here’s a suggestion. Find a group where all you have to do is yell and throw rocks. Learn what to yell. Demand your right to get EVERYTHING FOR NOTHING. That is all.”

Do you want a piece of interesting news? I can offer it, based on my experience of the past 17 years writing online. The declining system of education creates a vacuum. And into that vacuum, writers who do value language step forward, and they do present actual ideas. This is a large vacuum, so it can accommodate many writers.

They are creating new realities.

And readers show up.

Miracle of miracles.

These writers and readers are the “replacement team.” They are standing in for the colleges and universities and the sloganeers.

They are not censoring themselves or anyone else.

They are proliferating language, not reducing it.

Here is the secret: the history of humans reveals that language does, in fact, expand. It doesn’t lie down and die. It doesn’t wait for know-nothings to catch up. It doesn’t wait for anyone. Poets and novelists and playwrights and essayists find and invent new branches of word and thought.

Their present is the future. They are making the future every day.

And as far as pure ideas go, no matter how hard some people have tried, Jefferson and Madison and Tom Paine and John Adams are not dead yet. Their shaped principles embedded in sentences live on.

If at some point, the entire population of the planet were illiterate, except for four writers, those four would invent a new ocean that can’t be contained—and somehow, readers would show up.

Perhaps you think I’m describing a kind of magic, and maybe I am, but I’m also giving you ironclad fact. It has always been so.

The Internet may have been invented with machine language, but the writers who have appeared on it are multiplying their own language.

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

“Under the surface of this global civilization, a great and secret war is taking place. The two opponents hold different conceptions of Reality. On one side, those who claim that humans operate purely on the basis of stimulus-response, like machines; on the other side, those who believe there is a gigantic thing called freedom. Phase One of the war is already over. The stimulus-response people have won. In Phase Two, people are waking up to the far-reaching and devastating consequences of the Pavlovian program.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

“From the moment the first leader of the first clan in human history took charge, he busied himself with this question: ‘What can I say and do that will make my people react the way I want them to.’ He was the first Pavlov. He was the first psychologist, the first propagandist, the first mind-control boss. His was the first little empire. Since then, only the means and methods have changed.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

A thought-form is a picture-plus concept in the mind that tends to guide behavior.

Imagine a few thousand such corporations with interlocking boards and directorates; colluding with super-regional governments and their honeycombed bureaucracies; combined with regional armies, intelligence agencies and technological elites; hooked to a global surveillance operation; in control of media; cooperating with the largest organized religions on Earth.

Imagine all this as essentially one organization—and you see the thought-form in its wide-screen version.

Top-down as top-down has never been before.

Functions and compartments defined and specialized at every level, and coordinated in order to carry out policy decisions.

As to why such a thought-form should come to dominate human affairs, the simplest explanation is: because it works.

But beneath that answer, for those who can see, there is much, much more.

Individuals come to think that “effective” and “instrumental” and “efficient” are more important than any other issues.

The Machine has come to the fore. All questions are now about how the individual sees himself fitting into the structure and function of The Machine.

Are human beings becoming social constructs?

Populations are undergoing a quiet revolution. We can cite some of the reasons: television; education; job training and employment requirements; the Surveillance State; government organizations who follow a “zero tolerance” policy; inundation with advertising.

Yes, it’s all geared to produce people who are artificial constructs.

And this is just the beginning. There are a number of companies (see, for example, affectiva.com) who are dedicated to measuring “audience response” to ads and other public messages. I’m talking about electronic measuring. The use of bracelets, for instance, that record students’ emotional responses to teachers in classrooms, in real time. (Bill Gates shoveled grant money into several of these studies.)

Then there is facial recognition geared to the task of revealing how people are reacting when they sit at their computers.

Push-pull, ring the bell, watch the dog drool for his food. Stimulus-response.

It’s not much of a stretch to envision, up the road a few years, whole populations more than willing to volunteer for this kind of mass experimentation. But further than that, we could see society itself embrace, culturally, the ongoing measurement of stimuli and responses.

“Yes, I want to live like this. I want to be inside the system. I want to be analyzed. I want to be evaluated. I want to accept the results. I want to be part of the new culture. Put bracelets on me. Measure my eye movements, my throat twitches that indicate what I’m thinking, and my brain waves. Going to a movie should include the experience of wearing electrodes that record my second-to-second reactions to what’s happening on the screen. I like that. I look forward to it…”

In such a culture, “Surveillance State” would take on a whole new dimension.

“Sir, I want to report a malfunction in my television set. I notice the monitoring equipment that tracks my responses to programs has gone on the blink. I want it reattached as soon as possible. Can you fix it remotely, or do you need to send a repair person out to the house? I’ll be here all day…”

People will take pride in their ongoing role as social constructs, just as they now take pride in owning a quality brand of car.

The thought process behind this, in so far as any thought at all takes place, goes something like: “If I’m really a bundle of responses to stimuli and nothing more, then I want to be inside a system that champions that fact and records it…I don’t want to be left out in the cold.”

Here is a sample school situation of the near future: for six months, Mr. Jones, the teacher, has been video recorded, moment by moment, as he instructs his class in English. All the students have been wearing electronic bracelets [apple watches], and their real time emotional responses (interest, boredom, aversion) have also been recorded. A team of specialists has analyzed the six months of video, matching it up, second by second, to the students’ responses. The teacher is called in for a conference.

“Mr. Jones, we now know what you’re doing that works and what you’re doing that doesn’t work. We know exactly what students are positively reacting to, and what bores them. Therefore, we’re going to put you into a re-ed seminar, where you’ll learn precisely how to teach your classes from now on, to maximize your effectiveness. We’ll show you how to move your hands, what tone of voice to use, how to stand, when to make eye contact, and so on…”

Mr. Jones is now a quacking duck. He will be trained how to quack “for the greater good.” He is now a machine toy. Whatever is left of his passion, his intelligence, his free will, his spontaneous insights, his drive to make students actually understand what they’re learning…all subordinated for the sake of supposed efficiency.

Think this is an extreme fantasy? See the Chicago Tribune, June 12, 2012, “Biosensors to monitor students’ attentiveness”:

“The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has poured more than $4 billion into efforts to transform public education in the U.S., is pushing to develop an ‘engagement pedometer.’ Biometric devices wrapped around the wrists of students would identify which classroom moments excite and interest them — and which fall flat.”

“The foundation has given $1.4 million in grants to several university researchers to begin testing the devices in middle-school classrooms this fall [2012].”

“The biometric bracelets, produced by a Massachusetts startup company, Affectiva Inc, send a small current across the skin and then measure subtle changes in electrical charges as the sympathetic nervous system responds to stimuli. The wireless devices have been used in pilot tests to gauge consumers’ emotional response to advertising.”

“Gates officials hope the devices, known as Q Sensors, can become a common classroom tool, enabling teachers to see, in real time, which kids are tuned in and which are zoned out.”

“Existing measures of student engagement, such as videotaping classes for expert review or simply asking kids what they liked in a lesson, ‘only get us so far,’ said Debbie Robinson, a spokeswoman for the Gates Foundation. To truly improve teaching and learning, she said, ‘we need universal, valid, reliable and practical instruments’ such as the biosensors.”

“The Gates Foundation has spent two years videotaping 20,000 classroom lessons and breaking them down, minute by minute, to analyze how each teacher presents material and how those techniques affect student test scores.”

“Clemson received about $500,000 in Gates funding. Another $620,000 will support an MIT scientist, John Gabrieli, who aims to develop a scale to measure degrees of student engagement by comparing biosensor data to functional MRI brain scans [!] (using college students as subjects).”

When you boil it down, the world-view represented here has nothing to do with “caring about students.” It has everything to do with the Pavlovian view of humans as biological machines.

What input yields what response? How can people be shaped into predictable constructs?

As far as Gates is concerned, the underlying theme, as always, is: control.

In this new world, the process of thinking and comparing and independently judging, and the freedom to make individual choices…well, for whatever that was worth, we can’t encourage it for a whole society. It’s too unpredictable. We don’t have time for that sort of thing. No, we have to achieve reduction. We have to seek out lowest common denominators.

This is what universal surveillance is all about; the observation of those denominators and the variances from them—the outlying and therefore dangerous departures from the norm.

“Well, we’ve tracked Mr. Jones’ classroom for a year now, and we’ve collated all the measurements of reactions from the students. It was a wonderful study. But we did notice one thing. All the students showed similar patterns of reactions over time…except two students. We couldn’t fit them into the algorithms. They seemed to be responding oppositely. It was almost as if they were intentionally defecting from the group. This signals some kind of disorder. We need a name for it. Is it Oppositional Defiance Disorder, or is it new? We recommend attaching electrodes to those two students’ skulls, so we can get a better readout of their brain activity in real time.”

You see, everything must be analyzed on the basis of stimulus response. Those two students are suffering from a brain problem. They must be. Because if they aren’t, if they have the ability to choose and decide how to respond, then they have free will, and that can’t be measured. Much deeper, that also suggests an X-factor in humans, wherein the flow of chemicals and atoms and quarks and mesons and photons don’t tell the whole story. The rest of the story would imply the existence of something that is…non-material…above and beyond push-pull cause and effect.

The gatekeepers of this world are obsessed with ruling that out. They guard Reality itself, which is to say, their conception of Reality. They are willing to spend untold amounts of money to make that Pavlovian conception universally accepted and universally loved.

Because they own that conception. They are the self-appointed title holders. They are the kings of that domain.

I feel obligated to inform them that their domain is much, much smaller than they think it is. And in the fullness of time, which is very long, the domain is going to fall and crack and collapse and disintegrate. And all their horses and all their men won’t be able to put it back together.

Eventually, a man like Bill Gates will be forgotten. He’ll be a small footnote on a dusty page in a crumbling book in a dark room on a remote island.

A morbid venal fool who chased, for a brief moment, fool’s gold.

There is an irreducible thing. It’s called freedom. It is native to every individual.

Sometimes it rears its head in the middle of the night, and the dreamer awakes.

And he asks himself: what is my freedom for?

And then he begins a voyage that no device can record, measure, or analyze.

If he pursues it long enough, it takes him out of the labyrinth.

Pavlov wrote: “Mankind will possess incalculable advantages and extraordinary control over human behavior when the scientific investigator will be able to subject his fellow men to the same external analysis he would employ for any natural object…”

Basically, Pavlov was promoting the idea that whatever an individual perceives and feels about his own experience is a confused mess and an obstruction.

Rather, the individual should ignore all that tripe, and instead, allow himself to be a “natural object,” see himself as a clean and simple response mechanism, as planned inputs cause him to behave in various ways.

In other words, then he will have no life.

Bill Gates and other elite planners are working toward this end.

When Ray Kurzweil talks about hooking brains up to super-computers, he is envisioning a process of downloading that goes beyond choice. Somehow, automatically, the brain and the individual (he apparently believes they are the same thing) will receive inputs that translate into knowledge and even talent. This is another fatuous version of Pavlov.

In Brave New World, Huxley wrote: “Hot tunnels alternated with cool tunnels. Coolness was wedded to discomfort in the form of hard X-rays. By the time they were decanted the embryos had a horror of cold. They were predestined to emigrate to the tropics, to be miner[s] and acetate silk spinners and steel workers. Later on their minds would be made to endorse the judgment of their bodies. ‘We condition them to thrive on heat’, concluded Mr. Foster. ‘Our colleagues upstairs will teach them to love it’.”

Stimulus-response.

If researchers developed this technology, who could doubt that elite planners would push it forward? It would be the culmination of their dream.

The freedom of the individual, his innate capacity to make wide-ranging choices, is the monkey wrench in the program. It is anti-stimulus-response.

This is why you would have to search far and wide to find, in one school, anywhere, on any level, a course that examines and promotes individual freedom.

It is anathema to the plan.

It is the silver bullet for the vampire.

Freedom comes from Within the individual, not from Without.

On the level of political control, freedom emerged and broke through during centuries of struggle.

Now, and in the future, every individual carries that torch.

So it is incumbent on the individual to understand the scope and meaning and power of his own freedom, and to decide for himself what his freedom is FOR.

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

But schools can preempt you. They can bring your child along, all the way to graduation from high school—and it turns out he’s illiterate.

I want to describe several levels of illiteracy that afflict the young. There are more, but I’ll focus on three.

One: At age 16, he can’t read words and understand them beyond, say, a fourth grade level. He can’t read an article. He can’t read a food label. He can’t read a sign at a pond that says swimming is dangerous.

Two: He can read a newspaper article at a 10th grade level. He knows what most of the words mean. But he doesn’t know what the author is saying—he doesn’t know and can’t explain what each paragraph is stating. He can’t articulate that.

Three: He can read the same article and tell you something about what it means. He can articulate the meaning of most paragraphs. But he doesn’t know and can’t tell you what final point the author is making. Perhaps he isn’t even aware that the author is trying to make a point. And he certainly can’t explain HOW the author is reasoning, how the author is moving through a series of inferences to arrive at a conclusion.

The number-one level of illiteracy is easy to spot. But the other two aren’t, because people (including many teachers) never make proper inquiries of the student. They don’t ask what each paragraph of an article SPECIFICALLY means. They don’t ask for the overall point the author is making. They don’t ask how the author is arriving at his conclusion. So these aspects of literacy are shrouded in darkness.

You can find estimates of the amount of illiteracy in your home country, but these assessments, gloomy as they are, don’t cover all the basic issues I’m raising here. This is called a clue. The researchers themselves don’t recognize all the aspects of a literate person.

If you had access to a high-school class, and you started asking students pointed questions about the issues I’m raising here, with respect to a particular newspaper article, you would discover a giant hole in education.

“Look, here is an article about White House foreign policy. You just read it. What the is author telling you? What basic point is he making in the article?”

Then stand back and watch what happens. Very little. Lots of blank faces.

Now, if you, as a parent, want to go even deeper, if you understand the article about foreign policy is driven by an agenda and the author is biased…what chance do you have? The students can’t even grasp what the author is SAYING.

A school teacher—or better yet, a home schooling parent—could undo all this damage. He could gradually take children through the three levels above and make sure the students emerge with a firm grasp of what it means to be literate. Not “in general,” but specifically.

When students are up to it, go over one article a dozen times (or more). Home in on each sentence, each paragraph, until the meanings become clear. Search for the conclusion the author is driving at. Finally, examine in detail HOW the author is arriving at his conclusion. Dig in. Dig in deep. Teach literacy as if you’re teaching anatomy, piece by piece.

The devil is in the details, as they say. Train students to find, appreciate, and understand details. Train them to be able to articulate the details. Don’t go for gloss and vague surface.

Over the course of a year, analyze a dozen or two dozen articles and watch what happens. Light bulbs go on. Students catch on. They begin to see through the fog. They turn into detectives. The glazed look in their eyes disappears. They move from passive to active. They show excitement. They’re alive. They’re alive to real education. Goofy transforms into sharp.

The potential ability was there. It was always there. It just needed to be brought out, step by step.

And then there is this: all the indoctrination that had been unleashed on students, all the training in “values” begins to vaporize. The students no longer accept it as a substitute for learning. They realize it was fluff and vapid generality.

They can find better values. They can find values based on the self-realization that they’re now alive and inquisitive and discerning—they’re capable, they’re not disabled. They don’t need fake learning and fake teachers and a fake system to push them along to graduation on a smooth river of pretense.

The conspiracy of pretense is gone, like a fever that the immune system demolishes.

Out of the vague and confusing mist, a literate person emerges.

Two basic cover stories permeate education these days. One, cooperative learning. In this setting, small teams of students are assigned projects. No individual student is responsible for his own work (a disaster). Two, the teacher asks students for their opinions about an article, an issue, a book. It’s assumed (by moral and cultural relativity theory) that students will have different and equally valid ideas about what they read. This skirts the fact that the students don’t truly understand what they’re reading in the first place. Therefore, what value do their opinions have?

This is a catastrophe. Every society and civilization has language. If the young aren’t taught that language successfully, they can’t function in many areas of life. Yes, some of them will succeed anyway, but the majority won’t. They’ll founder on the rocks of ignorance. The “culture” will concoct all sorts of reasons to support and excuse that ignorance, but the effort doesn’t wash. It merely postpones a day of reckoning.

To make true literacy come to pass, teachers and parents have to be literate themselves. This is a major issue, too. But a start needs to be made somewhere. To execute a course correction, somebody at the helm of a ship has to be able to steer. Somebody has to learn how.

Any person who has looked into the history of education in America soon learns—from authors John Taylor Gatto and Charlotte Iserbyt, for example—that the system has been intentionally rigged and degraded, because who in power wants millions of independent, literate, logical minds out there questioning and analyzing what elite power is really doing?

The way back from the swamp of incompetence and futility isn’t a short journey. But it can be accomplished, one teacher and one student at a time. One class at a time.

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

A hundred fifty years ago, at least some Americans recognized that all serious discourse depended on the use of the faculty called Reason.

Formal debate, science, and law all flowed from that source.

A common bond existed in some schools of the day. The student was expected to learn how Reason operates, and for that he was taught the only subject which could lay out, as on a long table, the visible principles: Logic.

This was accepted.

But now, this bond is gone.

The independence engendered by the disciplined study of logic is no longer a desired quality in students.

The classroom, at best, has taken on the appearance of a fact-memorization factory; and we should express grave doubts about the relevance and truth of many of those facts.

A society filled with people who float in the drift of non-logic is a society that declines.

Ideologies that deny individual freedom and independence are welcomed with open arms.

When education becomes so degraded that young students are no longer taught to reason clearly, private citizens have the obligation rebuild that system so the great contribution to Western civilization—logic—is reinstated in its rightful place.

Logic, the key by which true political discourse, science, and law were, in fact, originally developed, must be unearthed.

Logic and reasoning, the capacity to think, the ability to analyze ideas—an ability which has been forgotten, which has been a surpassing virtue in every free civilization—must be restored.

Once a vital thing has been misplaced, buried, and covered over by mindless substitutions, people cannot immediately recognize the original thing has any importance, meaning, or existence.

To declare its importance makes no sense to “the crowd.” They look bewildered and shake their heads. They search their memories and find nothing.

They prefer to adhere to rumor, gossip, accusation, wild speculation, and fear mongering as the primary means of public discourse and assessment of truth.

These habits light their paths. These reflexes give them some degree of pleasure. These idols become their little gods.

To win out over such attachments and superstitions is a job for the long term.

But if our labors yield rewards, we can once again bring import to education, and to the idea of authentic freedom that once cut a wide swathe through darkness.

A string of direct and distracting abuses has saddled our schools. Among them:

* Teachers believe they need to entertain children, in order to capture their attention;

* School systems have substituted the need for public funds in the place of actually supplying a sound education;

* Under the banner of political correctness, school texts have been sanitized to the point of sterility, in order to avoid the possibility of offending, to the slightest degree, any group;

* Students rarely confront information in the form in which it is delivered to people all over the world—they confront substitutes;

* Students have, in this respect, been coddled;

* Subjects such as sex education, which belong in the family, have been delivered into the hands of schools and teachers;

* Indeed, in certain key respects, schools are asked to substitute and stand in for parents;

* Masked as “learning opportunities,” various political agendas have been inserted in school curricula;

* The basis on which every historic document establishing some degree of freedom was debated and drafted—logical thought—has been eliminated from the curriculum as a serious discipline;

* Students are permitted and even encouraged to drift and grasp at superficially attractive ideas and fads of the moment;

* In this respect, freedom has been reinterpreted to mean “mental incapacity and wandering thought”;

* The vast contributions of the ancient Greek civilization, where logic as a crucial subject was born, have been obliterated, minimized or summarized in sterile fashion;

* Logic, the connective tissue which binds together the progression of ideas in rational argument, has been kept away from students;

* The result is the production of shallow minds that cannot see the architecture of reasoning;

* Students, at sea, begin to invent wholly insufficient standards for accepting or rejecting various points of view and supposed authorities;

* Students lose their true independence without ever having gained it;

* The low level of overall literacy in our schools is matched only by the non-comprehension of rational thought;

In the presence of these and other deficiencies and abuses, students are pushed through, from grade to grade, graduation to graduation, as a bureaucratic function, regardless of their ability.

Therefore, citizens of good intent must offload this system. They must assume responsibility for teaching children the missing key to education.

Logic; the capacity to reason, to think lucidly; to separate sense from chatter; to discover deception and avoid being influenced by it; to remain free and independent from the shifting opinions of “the herd”; to maintain personal liberty in the face of every spurious enticement to abandon it; to come to grips with competitive sets of First Principles which will lead to freedom or slavery; these are the stakes in our time.

This is the crossroad.

Choose the path that can bring us the fulfillment of a worthy goal.

Choose reason over vacuous mindlessness.

We, who still know the power of the mind, and who understand how that power can be harnessed to shape independence and liberty, can bring, out of the dust of recent history, an education that truly trains the intellect.

Logic is the foundation of such an education.

If schools, which have become madhouses and factories and toxic medical dispensaries, will not teach it, we can teach it.

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.